Spot the difference

6.30am: leave the house, in the dark, quietly so as not to wake the family

7am: On the underground, review my diary and decide on which of the day’s five clashing meetings I’ll go to. Catch up on emails from the night before. ?

8.15am: Prepare for the Board meeting – one project is off-track and it could mean serious shortages in a service for children. Call a few key people together to brainstorm solutions.

8.45am: Management team meeting. Colleague survey results are in: a good bump in engagement but some teams are overstretched because of continued vacancies. Make a note to catch up with HR on progress with recruitment.

9.36am: Just heard we’re on the list for PMQs. That means all hands on deck to provide sharp briefing and accurate data for the Prime Minister on an area fraught with complexity that he knows very little about. Oh, and answers to tonne of other questions on anything else that could follow.

11am: Meeting with the Treasury about the Spending Review. Need to find another lot of savings while delivering more impact… oh, and more evidence on what’s working. ?

11.45am: Stakeholder call on the child safety bill – businesses are concerned about the regulations, charities think they don’t go far enough.

12.30: Lunch time training session on how to interrogate the reliability of data as an SRO for a major project… confidence intervals and regression analysis over sandwiches.

1.15: Senior leadership meeting about where the savings are going to come from. Tales of woe all round.

2pm: Read the findings of the ethics committee: was the dismissal of a public sector worker justified and handled properly?

2.45pm: Work out what to do about an under-spend in the budget because of a procurement issue. Make a note to catch up with Procurement on unblocking the problem. ?

3.30pm: Meet with the team managing the office move across five sites. Logistics hiccups and staff concerns need to be addressed.

4.15pm: Feedback session with a member of the team who’s having difficulty with a colleague.

4.30pm: See the Minister about a policy decision where there’s no way to keep all interests happy. Decide how to manage the fact that where she wants more work is precisely in the team where we have a shortage.

5pm: Leave the office just in time to pick up my son from his childminder. First look at today’s inbox on the train home.

Breathe. Rinse. Repeat.

This snapshot of what my days used to be like as a Senior Civil Servant fill me with a mixture of nostalgia and relief. Nostalgia about the privilege it was to work at national level on such a fascinating and always-challenging array of things and relief that these days I have a little more control over my time.

I know now from my own experience as a leader in different sectors that the constant pressure of an over-full diary and the sheer diversity of things you might need to understand and opine on in single a day is not unique to government. Switching from operational detail to strategic decision-making to shaping team culture to negotiating with a tough stakeholder – that’s all part of your role as a leader, wherever you are.

But I do regularly reflect on the differences too. What difference does it make to do all of those things in the context of politics? How does the potentially very public exposure of leadership in government affect how we do the job? And who do we learn from when the value we are seeking to create is so different in nature, so hard to measure and very often more contested than the figures on a balance sheet?

In order to avoid getting overwhelmed by these questions, I thought I would start by exploring what's different about the context of leadership in the public sector. Here’s a starter for ten but I’d love to know what you think:

??Scale. The ramifications of your success (and failure) as a leader in government are potentially more far-reaching or profound than in other roles. That might be because of the sheer scope of your role – in one job I was responsible for the funding system for providers of childcare across England. There were tens of thousands of them. If our team made a mistake in the formula we used for working out the funding it could affect quite a lot of people… Sometimes it’s more a question of severity, whether that’s life and death questions of how the government responds to a terrorist kidnapping of an aid worker overseas or the impact on a child’s life chances if they don’t get access to the specialist services they need to thrive.

??Politics. Imagine if every four years your CEO was put at risk of losing their job based on the views of a huge and varied group of customers that the company might only have a partial connection to. Their (and your) performance in the job today might contribute a bit to the outcome, but probably quite indirectly. What would it be like to advise and be led by that CEO over time, especially in year four? ?Then add to the mix that you get a new CEO and executive team on a regular (and unplanned) basis who have no prior knowledge of your business. Who need to stand up in public and on the news regularly (sometimes within days of being appointed) to be cross-examined on the detail of everything you do. Who need to make big and far-reaching decisions from the start. Their choices will – hopefully – be informed by your expert advice but will also be driven by political debates, incentives and influences completely (and purposely) out of bounds for you. Imagine leading through that.

??Complexity. The senior leaders I work with in the public and third sectors often talk about how much they are motivated by the intellectual challenge of their work. Dealing with knotty, seemingly intractable problems facing society (homelessness, inequality, climate) where there are no simple answers or reliable ‘how to’ guides is part of the attraction. It’s not just because of the potential to do good, but the unexpected twists and turns and learning along the way. This is partly still about scale: answering big questions that can have profound impact. But it’s also about politics, because what you decide to do, where, when (and for how much) is not just about what works but also about what’s considered important and to whom. At a very practical level, stakeholder management in government is a whole different ball game because you have to see, hear and respond to everyone.

??Prioritisation. I work with leaders at one UN organisation that is striving to focus on results and impact. One of the difficulties they face is that, as a multi-lateral global organisation, it’s pretty hard for them to prioritise in a meaningful way. They can’t just say ‘we won’t work on that issue this year’ – they’re expected to be across everything, for everyone, all the time. And the same goes for national governments – they have a responsibility to meet the needs of all the citizens they represent. We might have differing political views about how expansive (or not) that responsibility should be, and in truth this prioritisation is happening all the time (just look at investment in adult social care), but on the face of it all the balls need to be kept in the air, even if some are kept higher than others.

So perhaps prioritisation is harder for public sector leaders precisely because of the scale, politics and complexity that characterise their world. This certainly matters: first, because focusing your energy is essential to impact and second because it goes to the heart of one of the most pressing questions we all need to answer for ourselves and our organisations: how do we do our jobs in a sustainable way? How do we manage a to-do list that is always too long, a diary that is always too full and all those ‘priorities’ that are always too important to drop? And ultimately how do we make a difference in the world without too great a cost to ourselves and to the people we love? ?

How is leadership in the public sector different in your experience?

What has helped you lead well and what different approaches do you think are needed to support current and future public sector leaders? ??

Answers on a postcard, in a bottle or just in the comments below please. ??